Should older, single adults still save sex for marriage?

There’s an old article on CNN’s Belief Blog about how young Christians aren’t saving sex for marriage anymore. In it, the writer also says the average age at marriage is much older for today’s people than it was for the people of yore.

“Today,” he writes, “it’s not unusual to meet a Christian who is single at 30 – or 40 or 50, for that matter. So what do you tell them? Keep waiting?”

Frankly? Yes.

Perhaps it strikes the average adult in our culture as unreasonable to expect older, unmarried adults not to have sex, even if they’re Christians. My hunch, however, is that this ultimately only strikes the average adult as unreasonable because it’s the norm for older, unmarried adults to have sex.

It’s the status quo, in other words. It’s business as usual. Which is like saying “the reason you can’t expect older, unmarried adults not to have sex is because older, unmarried adults have sex.”

Which is kind of like saying “it’s a good idea to do the stuff that most people do.” That the reason it’s ok to uncritically do the things that are normal is because they are normal.

But are the normal things normal because they’re good, or are they normal because we’re keeping them that way?

It’s parallel to and an example of this:

“We see that people don’t save sex for marriage.

We see that many men and women lack integrity, or are selfish, immature or dishonest.

We can continue not to date them, or we can lower the bar.

Most people lower the bar.”

It’s normal, in other words, to encounter people who don’t save sex for marriage, or who lack integrity, or are selfish, immature or dishonest. It’s so normal that some people believe that’s as good as people get. And when other people believe that’s as good as people get, they are uncritically content to date them (and when we are content to date them, they date are content being selfish, for instance, or immature or dishonest, lacking integrity or living like it’s impossible to save sex for marriage.).

So it’s normal, in other words, to date people who don’t exactly meet reasonable standards.

But it isn’t normal because it’s good. It’s normal because we’re keeping it that way. And I’m of the opinion that we don’t have to.